Bennett Maruca,
assistant professor of physics and astronomy, spoke about the year’s physics
prize, which was shared by three scientists honored for what the Nobel
organization called “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of
complex physical systems.”
Half of the prize
was awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for laying the foundation of
our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humans influence it, reliably
predicting global warming. The other half was awarded to Giorgio Parisi for
revolutionizing the theory of disordered material and random processes on
scales from atoms to planets.
Maruca began his
talk by giving the audience some perspective on what complex systems are. A
one-liter bottle containing nothing but air, he said, holds 25 sextillion
molecules — “a huge number” that makes it impossible for even supercomputers to
measure and track each one. In short, complex systems contain too much
information, and so scientists must identify and focus on the key components, a
task that’s “easier said than done,” Maruca said.
Parisi worked with
magnetism and found ways to understand those complex systems. He discovered
hidden patterns in disordered and complex materials and found that his
discovery could be applied to many other complex materials as well, in areas
including mathematics, biology and neuroscience.
Maruca described
Parisi’s work as “finding order out of chaos” and said that, “Ultimately,
you’re solving problems with too much information.”
Manabe and
Hasselmann were recognized for their early work with climate models. “We
struggle to predict the weather a few days ahead,” Maruca said. “So how can we
predict climate decades into the future?”
In the 1960s, Manabe
demonstrated that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to higher
temperatures, work that became the basis for today’s climate models. A decade
later, Hasselmann created a model that linked weather and climate, showing that
such models can be accurate even though weather is changeable.